The Public Editor

An Advocate for Times Readers Introduces Himself

By DANIEL OKRENT

Published: December 7, 2003

WHEN The New York Times invites you to be the first person charged with publicly evaluating, criticizing and otherwise commenting on the paper's integrity, it's hard to say no: this is a pretty invigorating challenge. It's also hard to say yes: there are easier ways to make friends.

Reporters and editors (the thickness of their skin measurable in microns, the length of their memories in elephant years) will resent the public second-guessing. The people who run the newspaper may find themselves wondering how they might get away with firing me before my 18-month term is up. Too many combatants in the culture wars, loath to tolerate interpretations other than their own, will dismiss what I say except when it serves their ideological interests.

But those are their problems, not mine. My only concern in this adventure is dispassionate evaluation; my only colleagues are readers who turn to The Times for their news, expect it to be fair, honest and complete, and are willing to trust another such reader — me — as their surrogate.

So who am I?

By training and experience, I'm a journalist: for 25 years a magazine writer and editor, for the last couple of years (and during various other between-gigs intervals) a writer of books; earlier in my career, I spent nearly a decade as a book editor. When I was in school in the 1960's, I was a not-very-good campus correspondent for The Times, a little on the lazy side, rarely willing to make the third or fourth phone call to confirm the accuracy of what I'd been told on the first one. Instead I expended my energies in that hyperventilated era as a shamelessly partisan and embarrassingly inaccurate reporter for my college newspaper. Early in my magazine career, I at times participated in a form of attack journalism that today fills me with remorse — picking a target and sending out a reporter to bring back the scalp. I got fairer, and better, as I got older.

By upbringing and habit, I'm a registered Democrat, but notably to the right of my fellow Democrats on Manhattan's Upper West Side. When you turn to the paper's designated opinion pages tomorrow, draw a line from The Times's editorials on the left side to William Safire's column over on the right: you could place me just about at the halfway point. But on some issues I veer from the noncommittal middle. I'm an absolutist on free trade and free speech, and a supporter of gay rights and abortion rights who thinks that the late Cardinal John O'Connor was a great man. I believe it's unbecoming for the well off to whine about high taxes, and inconsistent for those who advocate human rights to oppose all American military action. I'd rather spend my weekends exterminating rats in the tunnels below Penn Station than read a book by either Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore. I go to a lot of concerts. I hardly ever go to the movies. I've hated the Yankees since I was 6.

To the degree that I've been the subject of Times reporting or commentary, I've generally been treated fairly. In 1985, though, a book of mine was clobbered in the Book Review (". . . [it] has difficulties with detail, pace and even words. . . . When Mr. Okrent is not forcing phrases, he collapses into cliché. . . .") by someone whose own book I had reviewed negatively — for The Times! — not three years earlier. My wife tells me I should get over it, but a grudge like this is much too nourishing to give up after only 18 years. It's also a reminder that real people can get hurt by a newspaper's missteps, and maybe I was made to suffer that review so I could empathize with similarly aggrieved parties two decades later.

Since my appointment was announced, I've heard complaints about the paper so intense they could peel paint. A former colleague told me she canceled her subscription because of The Times's "virulent anti-Catholicism." An acquaintance's parents consider the paper "prima facie anti-Semitic." One of my oldest friends is boycotting The Times because of what he considers its conscious hostility to conservatives and its "institutional inaccuracy." Another friend, inflamed by what he deems the absence of coverage of post-Taliban Afghanistan, asks, "Isn't The N.Y. Times as complicit as the Bush administration in ignoring this poor country?"

Let me acknowledge a theological principle of my own: I believe The Times is a great newspaper, but a profoundly fallible one. Deadline pressure, the competition for scoops, the effort at impartiality that can sometimes make you lean over so far backward that you lose your balance altogether — these are inescapably part of the journalism business. So is the boiling resentment toward men and women in power that can arise in a trade that requires, as Russell Baker once wrote, "sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie" to you.

Journalistic misfeasance that results from what one might broadly consider working conditions may be explainable, but it isn't excusable. And misfeasance becomes felony when the presentation of news is corrupted by bias, willful manipulation of evidence, unacknowledged conflict of interest — or by a self-protective unwillingness to admit error. That's where you and I come in. As public editor, I plan on doing what I've done for 37 years, reading the paper every day as if I, like you, were asking it to be my primary source of news and commentary (and ruefully expecting it to enrage me every so often as only a loved one can). But to enable me to represent you effectively when you have a complaint about The Times's integrity, the top editors are granting me open access to the entire staff, and space right here, every other week (more often if I think it's necessary), to comment on its work.

My copy will not be edited, except for grammar, spelling, and the like. Staff members are not required to answer my questions about coverage, presentation or other aspects of journalistic practice, but if they choose not to, I'll say so. In the interest of open communication with my fellow readers, I will try very hard not to speak to anyone at The Times off the record, on background, not for attribution, or under the cover of any of the other obfuscating cloud formations that befog modern journalism. I want to be able to let you know what I know — to remain a reader, even if a reader with an all-access backstage pass. I never want to be in the position of saying, "I know they did this right, but I'm not allowed to tell you why." The paper's operations may not always be transparent, but I hope my own arguments, assertions and, as necessary, indictments will be.

If I were running for re-election, you'd have every reason to doubt my independence; consequently, on May 29, 2005, by mutual agreement with executive editor Bill Keller, my name will disappear from the head of this column and from The Times's payroll ledger. Until then, I'll let my fellow readers decide if I'm doing my job honestly. Here's wishing good luck, and good will, to us all. See you in two weeks.

The public editor, who serves as the readers' representative, may be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com . Telephone messages: (212) 556-7652. His column will appear at least twice monthly in this section.